I grew up a few towns over in NJ from where Jim Cramer lives with his family. The rumor at the time was that his kids forced him to drop them off a block or so away the school because they were so embarrassed of him.

My company got bought out by a much larger company a few years ago. The thing I always tell people is that all of the problems with a small, family-owned company pretty much evaporated immediately. However, they were replaced with a whole set of new problems.

All of the openly racist old men are gone, and I feel a lot safer at work wearing my hair long and telling (select people) that I am queer. Now, there is private equity and uncertainty that there didn’t used to be. I got lucky and some of my coworkers didn’t. My new management team is wonderful and I do make a bit more money than I used to. Overall, I’m happy with some of the things that have happened. But, I am planning to get as much as I can out of the experience and eventually find something else.

Slightly off topic, but I was looking at anti-virus software recently and I noticed that the government banned Kaspersky because of “potential ties to the Russian government” and I had no idea because that software used to be everywhere. The American government is a big, embarrassing cry baby it’s hilarious.

They certainly have it!

I feel like it’s very difficult to respond to this news without sounding like a lib haha

I fucking love Black Marble. His subsequent album, It’s Immaterial is an album I come back to all the time

Can I get a source on SILO being zionist? Not doubting / arguing with you, but I’ve almost gone to shows there before and I’d like to see what their deal is.

I think this is a really good post and I appreciate that you took the time to write it out. The only thing I can really offer are some tips I have personally been using to avoid psychic damage caused by forcing AI into everything, especially art. They may be obvious, but have helped me a lot.

-use Bandcamp to discover new music. Lots of artists on there from bedroom musicians to people on smaller labels. Probably the most direct and ethical way to support musicians in our current system

-go to your local library. I found such genuine peace just walking around the stacks looking at all of the books in the collection. It feels almost viscerally shocking to me that they (printed books and libraries) still exist. I’ve been trying to get back into reading again.

-go to a museum. See some art. I think that some places have released statements about AI art and are specifically excluding it from collections, although I’m not sure.

-talk to people. I think most people who care even remotely about enjoying things don’t want AI generated content.

I think this probably excludes the youngest and oldest who can’t tell the difference, and slop brained AI bros. I did get in argument with my brother (who is a lib) because he was basically like “you’re going to have to embrace it because it’s the future” and I don’t believe that this is true. I think the fact that the US has leveraged it’s entire economy on something that is at best great for niche applications (protein and cancer research) and at worst a marketing gimmick is going to fail miserably. Though, I have no doubt it’s going to continue to be pushed and applied in as many areas as possible, I hope it doesn’t destroy everything in its wake.

It seems like they even made pirating it harder. I torrented a copy of cs6 and it still didn’t work.

Didn’t expect a Murakami reference, but here we are haha.

Better video than the Bad Empanada one

Sod off

Lmao. Yes I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Philadelphia. But this was on another level.

Also, I saw them live in Philadelphia and it was the worst live show situation I’ve experienced. The crowd was extremely obnoxious like the entire time. Mercilessly annoying. Technical difficulties and horrible sound.

I’m going to assume the context of this is old machines that still run Windows XP or something that are connected to expensive equipment with proprietary software. We have these at my job and if a computer broke, we had to buy a Windows xp build on ebay because our IT department laughed at us and was like “this is not our area and you are not networking any of these pc’s” I love the sign though haha

When I was in college, my group of friends were mostly libs and libertarians (I know) and the mother of one of these people once went on a rant in front of us about how Hamas and Hezbollah were going to team up and destroy Israel and kill all the Jews. After we left the house, I remember all of us just laughing at her and saying “what a fucking stupid take that was” despite not necessarily having the same opinions about Israel or having good opinions on anything else. But, we all knew this was stupid.

Having not read the article or knowing much about Lebanon, I’m going to assume this is still an extremely stupid and desperate thing to posit?

“when you come out your shit is gone, I’m in your area”

I attended a lecture recently given by a PhD student who is studying tuberculosis. Learning about the cellular mechanism that is used to infect the cells is terrifying. I won’t be able to do the explanation justice, but it basically it uses your immune system against you to create more toxins. One of the most terrifying things I’ve learned about in awhile.